The Su-37 did not enter production, despite a report in 1998 which claimed that Sukhoi had built a second Su-37 using the twelfth Su-27M airframe,[3] T10M-11 remained the sole prototype.

[5] At the insistence of General Director Mikhail Simonov, who had been the chief designer of the Su-27, Sukhoi and the Siberian Aeronautical Research Institute studied axisymmetrical vectoring nozzles.

[11] Two months later, the temporary engines were replaced with AL-37FUs; its nozzles could only deflect 15 degrees up or down in the pitch axis, together or differentially.

According to Simonov, such a feature would allow pilots to develop new combat manoeuvres and tactics, greatly enhancing its effectiveness in dogfights.

[16] The Super Cobra evolved into the kulbit (somersault), in which the Su-37 performed a 360-degree loop with an extremely tight turning radius the length of the aircraft.

[20] According to test pilot Anatoly Kvochur, thrust vectoring would have given the aircraft a considerable advantage in close-in dogfights.

[21] Nonetheless, critics have questioned the practical benefits of such manoeuvres; although they would allow an early missile lock-on, it would come at the expense of a rapid loss of kinetic energy, which would leave the aircraft vulnerable when pilots missed their first shot.

The loss of thrust vectoring was partially mitigated by an update to the fly-by-wire flight control system.

[25] The flight-test programme ended on 19 December 2002 when the aircraft's port tailplane broke off during a high-g manoeuvre, leading to it crashing at Shatura, near Moscow.

[27][28] Despite the entry of the Su-37 into Brazilian and South Korean fighter tenders, the aircraft failed to gain any foreign customers.

India in the mid-1990s funded the development of what would result in the Su-30MKI, which is a two-seat fighter design that incorporated the canards, N011M radar and thrust-vectoring technology that were present and evaluated on the Su-37.

[29] In addition, through tests of the Su-27M and the Su-37, engineers had determined that thrust vectoring could compensate for the loss of manoeuvrability brought about by the removal of canards, the design of which imposed a weight penalty on the airframe.